For manufacturing industries, it is an important issue to decide actual control conditions (e.g., values, ranges, options, or the like) of control factors (e.g., temperature, pressure, humidity, or the like) for a production line to improve yield related values (e.g., improve the yield, reduce the cost, or the like).
When there is a need in manufacturing new products, the manufacturer must set a proper control condition for each control factor of the production line. Moreover, during the process of manufacturing the products, the manufacturer also needs to timely evaluate whether the current control conditions of the control factors need to be adjusted. A production line usually involves multiple control factors, and various control conditions corresponding to each of the control factors form complex control combinations, which makes the manufacturer hard to make a decision when setting the control conditions for the control factors. Currently, many manufacturers rely on the experiences of the experienced practitioners for setting the control conditions of the control factors. However, this approach extremely depends on the experiences and, moreover, the yield related values can only be improved after many times of adjustment for most cases.
Some manufacturers design an experimental method (e.g., a Taguchi method and a response surface method) and obtain an optimal control condition set (including the control conditions of all the control factors) after many experiments. However, applying the optimal control condition set to an on-site production line is usually infeasible. For example, the control conditions that can be set for the control factors of an on-site production line are often restricted in range, variation amount, and/or adjustability. If the control condition(s) corresponding to some control factor(s) in the optimal control condition set cannot meet the restriction, the optimal control condition set cannot be applied to the on-site production line.
Accordingly, it is an important task to efficiently determine and/or correct the control condition set (i.e., determine and/or correct the control conditions of the control factors) that can be actually applied to the production line so as to improve the yield related values and achieve the production target.